1
My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead.
I went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set
off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered
fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate
youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory,
versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and
when I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants
School and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket to
Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidly
built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's
sister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds,
who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but
who was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the
three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my
father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge
within sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal
Palace. Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of
Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and
outskirts of Bromstead.
It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and
trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board,
the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off
a large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences
and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary
spectacle of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which
banged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see
them better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham
and Greenwich, impressed upon me the interminable extent of London's
residential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas,
rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway
bridges. I have forgotten the detailed local characteristics--if there
were any--of much of that region altogether. I was only there two years,
and half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with
Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of
twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and
the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and
railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the evening
occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-spirited
boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these twilight prowls
with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearing
in the world.
My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the
eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights a
week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until
within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school
in order to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voracious
appetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge
Middleton Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography.
On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and my
mother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she
herself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I was
at home as little as I could contrive.
Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful
place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or her
mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I
remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics
I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Church
theology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that
event had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My
reason would not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, he
was so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him a
remote chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had
taught me to read and write and pray and had done many things for me,
indeed she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes until I
rebelled against these things as indignities. But our minds parted very
soon. She never began to understand the mental processes of my play,
she never interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had felt
towards my father.
Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think
he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness in
their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half
ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and
presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why
nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have
disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his
careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed
and definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and decorum and
the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass
of the English people--for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS
the largest single mass--in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I
suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little
poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and
starched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat
and peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like
the Prince Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on
their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) little
girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she must have
seen herself ruling a seemly “home of taste,” with a vivarium in the
conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making
preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-teaching, his diagrams
of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that
contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose
tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading
fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather
unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he
would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She
was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her standards,
and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her.
The blazing things he said rankled in her mind unforgettably.
As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude
to nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and not
to her. “YOUR father,” she used to call him, as though I had got him for
her.
She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally
self-subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days
I used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerable
interest in the housework that our generally servantless condition put
upon her--she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week--but
she did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of our
furniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and
without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly
all our Bromstead things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly
associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used
very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal
dread of “blacks” by day and the “night air,” so that our brightly clean
windows were rarely open.
She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do not
think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that dated from
her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them; there was
Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I remember with particular
animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books of
hers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico and
figured muslin. To me in these habiliments they seemed not so much books
as confederated old ladies.
My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced
to watch me in the choir.
On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy
comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she
found these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put
her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing
that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most
young people I could not imagine mental states without definite forms.
She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends,
writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing mainly with
births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and
the distresses of bankruptcy.
And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that
I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credible
to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of
fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. She
put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff little
comments on casual visitors,--“Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk
about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. delighted and VERY
ATTENTIVE.” Such little human entries abound. She had an odd way of
never writing a name, only an initial; my father is always “A.,” and I
am always “D.” It is manifest she followed the domestic events in the
life of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar
interest and sympathy. “Pray G. all may be well,” she writes in one such
crisis.
But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to tell
easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in very
great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I
find such things as this: “Heard D. s----.” The “s” is evidently “swear
“--“G. bless and keep my boy from evil.” And again, with the thin
handwriting shaken by distress: “D. would not go to church, and hardened
his heart and said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy.
The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than
their maker!!!” Then trebly underlined: “I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING.”
Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More
comforting for me to read, “D. very kind and good. He grows more
thoughtful every day.” I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the
death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for many
years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace
at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of
this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diary
also she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaper
between its pages I find this passage that follows, written very
carefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon
them. They run:--
“And if there be no meeting past the grave;
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.”
That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my
mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affected
me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a
whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general
effect quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went through
all her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term
of tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there
grew upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love for
me, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed.
I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know
when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly
I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with
irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing
quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it
had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements.
It was essential to our situation that we should fail to understand.
After this space of years I have come to realisations and attitudes that
dissolve my estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, I
can see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and desiring and
muddle-headed person. There are times when I would have her alive again,
if only that I might be kind to her for a little while and give her
some return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires, she
evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I
could make that return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her
demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I
saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote....
My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I
feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turned
his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could look
back without that little twinge to two people who were both in their
different quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian
and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of
the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of
those things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I
cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed
the most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained
in a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in
the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
estrangement followed from that.
These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needs
consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I
am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more
and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religious
organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance,
by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism
with its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record of
uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted
to a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful
quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain
ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be
the one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness
and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is
exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect.
Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against
broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark
allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from
worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle human
sympathy. For only by isolating its flock can the organisation survive.
Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that ever
came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of
God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic.
The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have
nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural
kindliness of men. The contents were all admirably adjusted to keep a
spirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous.
There would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fell
upon individuals for Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening
towards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human
beings; there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged
Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels
with boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
would be the appallingly edifying careers of “early piety” lusciously
described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their final ruin
unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give up
subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love.
My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my
spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering....
2
A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was
at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the
Blackfriars.
I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor of
discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence
so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some
way down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man of
mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose,
a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the
wings of his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealed
relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustache
wave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious
look. After dinner he a little forced himself upon me. At that time,
though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to
be shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation
with me and anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried
to make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he
ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
“One wants,” he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, “to put
constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, very
narrow. Very.” He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.
“One has to consider them carefully, one has to respect their attitudes.
One dare not go too far with them. One has to feel one's way.”
He chummed and the moustache bristled.
A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there
was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed and
educated....
I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chop
whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still
hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening of
museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as
ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness
of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one
wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed
attack on poor little Wilkins the novelist--who was being baited by the
moralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, not
being in holy wedlock, desire a baby and say so....
The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go
on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying
now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely
fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of
these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants a
great wind from the sea!
3
While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They had
this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly
taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--realities
I had indeed known about before but never realised. Each of these
experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the values in
my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment. One of these
disturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed of a new
pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love. It was altogether
surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as an only child I had always
been fairly well looked after and protected, and the result was an
amazing confidence in the practical goodness of the people one met in
the world. I knew there were robbers in the world, just as I knew there
were tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to face
seemed equally impossible.
The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sorts
of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone out
of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefully
accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience in
knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then one afternoon I
dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a field
between Penge and Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without
at the time appreciating what had happened, then, later, before I got
home, when my hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dear
new possession I found it gone, and instantly that memory of something
hitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back and
commenced a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader of a
little gang of four or five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted
sizes and slouching carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
“Lost anythink, Matey?” said he.